And Whitman made things more difficult by sometimes modifying some of his basic tenets, such as the idea that all men are created equal: His elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom‘d” celebrates the “redeemer-president” Abraham Lincoln above all humanity, even himself. Whitman’s glorification of the physical, too, changed as his body aged. In later masterpieces, such as “Passage to India,” he finds inspiration in the amazing output of the intellect (such as the Suez Canal and the transatlantic cable crossing) rather than in the miracles of the human form. Though unconditional truisms seem to run through his oeuvre, they are often more nuanced than casual readers recognize: His interrogations in such poems as “To the States,” for example, have taught generations of radicals that one can be actively critical and still patriotic. Even his ultimate vision of America as an abstract ideal, as expressed in his aptly titled 1888 poem “America,” seems far removed from the voluptuous, fluid, fertile image of the nation in the 1855 preface.

All these revisions and reconsiderations are signs of an active and flexible mind, one unwilling to settle or stagnate despite the appeal of worldly success and the acceptance and burdens of heartache, disease, loss, and age. Whitman was himself pleased with his unending evolution and wrote some of his finest poems about his passages as man and artist. In “There Was a Child Went Forth,” the poet details the people, places, and events that form the character of he “who now goes and will always go forth every day.” The “doubts of night- time” that trouble him are further explored in “The Sleepers,” in which he learns to embrace the continuous, ever-changing cycles of life rather than fear the darkness and the unknown.

But Whitman’s most inspiring rite-of-passage poem was borne out of actual personal and professional crises he experienced between 1855 and 1856. Despite the critical and commercial failure of the first publication of Leaves, Whitman set to work almost immediately on the revisions and new poems of the Second Edition. The artist may have felt the need to write, but the man found life getting in the way. “Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious,” Whitman wrote in a notebook entry in late 1855. “I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I had supposed them, are not shallow—and people will most likely laugh at me.—My pride is impotent, my love gets no response” (Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts, p. 167). “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which Whitman uses his twice-daily ferry ride as a metaphor, describes the poet’s journey through the “dark patches” to a moment of emotional equilibrium and spiritual poise. His movement through crisis brings him in communion with “others that are to follow me” and secures “the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others” (Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts, p. 199). “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” perhaps more successfully than any other poem, unites Whitman and his reader across the “impassable” boundary of time.

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid
in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at
you now, for all you cannot see me?
(“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” p. 320).

A few years ago, I took a group of my Cooper Union students on a literary tour of Brooklyn Heights. As we emerged from the subway onto Henry Street, I pointed left to our first “site”: the general area of the printshop where Whitman had helped typeset the First Edition of Leaves, now a housing development fittingly named Whitman Close. Our efforts to find Whitman’s spirit alive and well were not off to a promising start. In fact, the poet really seemed dead for the first time, even to me.

A sophomore art major named Alice Wetterlund decided to use the lull to perform her recitation (each student was required to memorize and present at least ten lines of Whitman’s verse or prose). As she began to recite, she struggled to make the words heard over the street bustle. Then she spotted a utility truck being used by the members of a local carpenter’s union who were staging a strike in front of the old St. George Hotel. One of the carpenters was using a megaphone from inside the truck to promote union sentiment and camaraderie among the strikers.

Before I realized what she was up to, Alice ran over to the van and addressed the speaker. His announcements suddenly ceased. Alice disappeared for a moment; in the next, her distinct voice carried over the hubbub of Henry Street, proclaiming the entirety of “A Woman Waits for Me.”

Traffic slowed down. Strikers stood still. And when Alice had finished reciting the poem, a brief silence was swallowed up by honks of approval, shouts, and cheers from the carpenters, and our own wild reactions to her stunt.

Whitman repeatedly asks his readers to be progressive in every sense of the word, and to work constantly toward the fulfillment of America’s promise. He hoped that “greater offspring, orators, days” than himself and his own would rise, and must have considered the idea that he himself would eventually fall behind the times.